User:Ssstephen/Reading/The Practice of Everyday Life but the actual one
Consumer production
For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with these images.
Is what the consumer makes also in the category of representation, what separates it from behaviour, is he implying there is something outside of these two categories. Culture is presented to me and I represent it. Receptive and generative modes, is the point just that these are not clearly active/passive roles and are more mushy into eachother?
"consumption"... is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly
This certainly sounds like active consumption. There dont seem to be any real examples here though. Is production also a type of consumption? What am I consuming when I produce? Environments, methodologies, inheritance, pollenation.
speaking operates within the field of a linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it establishes a present relative to a time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocutor) in a network of places and relations. These four characteristics of the speech act<3> can be found in many other practices (walking, cooking, etc.).
His point in the introduction that "a relation defines its terms" could be applied more extremely here I think. Is speaking something done to language by speakers, or are speech acts the girders that connect speakers in a structure called language. A walk is an episode that creates a route for a walker in a space. A cooking act is an event where recipes, ingredients, bodies, heat, etc come into a relation with eachother.
If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also "miniscule" and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what "ways of operating" form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or "dominee's"?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.
The territory is becoming more and more like the map but it is not there are cracks and tears and smudges.
the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of "discipline:"
Why do you want to bring this to light? Is it a good idea to produce something that reveals the occult exodisciplines (esodisciplines, paradisciplines) that consumers are using and making. Is there a tension between producer and consumer, and if so whose side are you on?
allowing the logic of unselfconscious thought to be taken seriously
Can we doubt ourselves while we doubt? Take as a departure point the possibility that you are imaginary.
must seek to restore to everyday practices their logical and cultural legitimacy
I guess this is the reason he wants to bring the practices into this world of writing, to give them a voice and legitimacy in this context. It feels a little like appropriation or domination in some way, of writing over other practices. Things that exist outside of words. Maybe its just translation but even then.
this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible
inferior access to information, financial means, and compensations of all kinds elicits an increased deviousness, fantasy, or laughter.
The tactics of practice
unrecognised producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality
I mean the language is very romanticised which is nice. What does it mean to use romantic language to describe reading and the reader. Is the author trying to show me affection? He is trying to touch me but maybe also to give me space, to see if there is something between us or if we can make something between us.
"indirect" or "errant" trajectories obeying their own logic... trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space
Unreadable except maybe to the performer of the trajectory. A reading movement in this way is somehow symbolic or generating meaning. And then readable through a sort of affective proprioception, an awareness on the part of the reader/performer of where the reading is bringing them, or taking them away from, or moving them through. The forms that the reading creates.
the trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop
It is trickery. A magic trick. This is maybe suggesting some sort of deception though, on the part of the subject against the system. While this sounds fun it's not really acknowledging that the rest of the system that is being deceived is also made up at least in part of humans. So how do you know you're not deceiving, hurting, or even abusing other humans while performing your little magic tricks?
Statistical inquiry, in breaking down these "efficatious meanderings" into units that it defines itself, in reorganising the results of its analyses according to its own codes, "finds" only the homogenous. The power of its calculations ties in its ability to divide, but it is precisely through this analytic fragmentation that it loses sight of what it claims to seek and to represent.
VIDE AND DECONQUER. What is the temporal version of a void? non-events. boredom. wasting (vast-ing) time. slacking. not doing anything. also fragmentation sounds kinda nice Im ok with that.
The "proper" is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized "on the wing". Whatever it wins, it does not keep.
This sounds a little like opportunist stealing. I dunno, the article in general is making these tactics sound very desirable, morally good, revolutionary, but is not really addressing in any way whether the tactics have consequences. If your trying to empower maybe you need to accept that that power can be used. I understand that it is written from a place of the tactics being the consumers' only option and way of operating, but it could be a bit more critical about their effects.
everyday practices that produce without capitalising, that is, without taking control over time
Not taking control is good though. Producing without capitalising is also good. I guess my question is whose space and time are you taking? The article sometimes mentions hunters and I think its a relevant metaphor. A hunter navigates through and takes from an ecosystem. In an attempt to survive? Is a forager better than a hunter? Is a gardener worse than a forager? A farmer? A land-owner? Humans have to eat or else they die. What do the bacteria in my gut want to eat? How much control do they have over my desires and my volition? How much of an effect do they have on our environment?
pedestrians, in the streets they fill with the forests of their desires and goals
What parts of me want to walk. Not my feet. Skin has a microbiome. Skin is scavenged by cute cutaneous microorganisms. Colonies grow, other bacteria produce molecules as a tactic to inhibit colonization. They desire to avoid extermination. They want to live, not necessarily together or in harmony. But a harmony or allostasis emerges.
an innovation infiltrated into the text and even into the terms of a tradition. Imbricated
There are so many contradictory driving forces but I suppose there is a flow in some direction or directions generally and things start to fit together, and start to break apart. Is there a border between laminarity and turbulence, can it be crossed or mixed. Can some chaotic advection occur.
the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires—an art of manipulating and enjoying
But like less manipulation and maybe a better approach is surfing a wave which can be intentional and yeah of course enjoyable but its not about reclaiming control but accepting your ability to move and playing with it, from a place of awareness and love which I'm not sure this text is coming from.
the involvement of the subject diminishes in proportion to the technocratic expansion of these systems. Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks, the individual detatches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover
It's all framed a bit aggressively and I'm not sure if I'm into the whole predator/prey thing. I think the same stuff could be described more playfully. Although maybe this is insensitive to the power dynamics that are actually happening in some situations, maybe the consumer is pushed more into an inescapable position that requires evasive tactics.
the microscopic, multiform, and innumerable connections between manipulating and enjoying, the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it
The osmosis or advection or maybe even dissipation between manipulation and enjoyment is some sort of moral dissolution. When is it ok to enjoy, or to manipulate. Says who? Which parts are the social and which parts are the order. At what point does living together turn into an order. It's something that happens at a lot of different moments or places, and its different for different observers. I guess just like have regular check ins with eachother? Uhh chaos seems so complex sometimes but it doesnt have to be heavy. But there is a lot at stake so its ok and maybe good if it feels heavy sometimes.
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Further reading: Musil's man without qualities, Alain Desrosiere's "Elements pour l'histoire des nomenclatures socio-professionnelles" in Pour un Histoire de la Statistique, Le Livre des Ruses la stratégie politique des arabes